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I was sad to hear today about the recent death of Dr. Larry Hurtado, a leading scholar of early Christianity. Like many of you, I have learned much from his work. I always appreciated his engagement with the public through his blog. And he was an independent thinker. While a part of the “early high christology” club, still he was unafraid to disagree with central claims made by people like Dr. N.T. Wright and Dr. Richard Bauckham, unlike many a lesser scholar.
His strong suit was history, and the New Testament understood in light of it. I saw him as ambivalent about drawing theological conclusions from his historical work. Certainly, he let others draw such conclusions from his work though, others who understood “high christology” as meaning that Jesus had a divine nature, or who saw the worship of Jesus as proof of his “deity,” or who took the “binitarian pattern of worship” that Dr. Hurtado saw in the New Testament as evidence that these authors thought the one God to be multipersonal.
He has been most known for his work on the early worship of Jesus. He argues cogently that even in the earliest parts of the New Testament, the religious worship of Jesus is presupposed, such as in Philippians 2.
But unlike some evangelical apologists and theologians, Dr. Hurtado did not draw the conclusion that early Christians thought that the man Jesus was God himself. He recognized that New Testament authors never confused together Jesus and God. He was not a “Jesus is God” apologist, although I think he supposed that somehow his work counted against any “mere man” reading of New Testament christology, if only because he believed that Paul taught Jesus’s literal, personal existence before his conception in Mary. (About that, I disagree.)
In fact, many of Dr. Hurtado’s points can be and have been happily accepted by unitarian Christians like me. If your main motivation for believing in “the deity of Christ” is “Surely, this must be why the authors of the New Testament thought he should be worshiped” then the work of Dr. Hurtado will come as a shock to you.
Once, privately, I asked Dr. Hurtado – in light of the distinction he quite correctly makes between Jesus and God, and his views on the New Testament justification for the worship of Jesus – why he wasn’t himself a unitarian Christian. To paraphrase his answer, he said that he doesn’t like “labels!”
In tribute to Dr. Hurtado, whom I had the privilege of interviewing several times, this week I’ll be re-posting podcasts and blog posts that feature his work. I think you will see in them why so many of us valued his scholarship.
I have benefited so much from him, this is a very sad day.
It’s a real shame that he would systematically avoid drawing the obvious theological conclusions from his work… when you look at it closely, very little separates Hurtado’s understanding of the NT from that of semi-arians, especially homoeans from the 350’s who refrained from using any talk of essence/nature, etc.
This reluctance to draw theological conclusions has now left the door open for people to forever misrepresent him. It’s incredibly frustrating when you see them appealing to Hurtado’s work to defend the trinity, even scholars who really should know better, like Swain, Bird and others, who think that when he argues for the early programmatic inclusion of Jesus in the devotional practices previously reserved to God, it just means ‘Jesus is the God of Israel’, even though Hurtado explicitly denies this in dozens of places.
Scott Swain in some JETS article:
“Richard Bauckham and Larry Hurtado, representatives of what Hengel dubbed the “new history of religions school,” have further discredited Bousset’s theory, demonstrating that the early church identified Jesus with and worshipped Jesus as the one true God of Israel.”
Mike Bird in “How God became Jesus”:
“[Hurtado]’s conclusion is that early Christian worship shows a clear veneration of Jesus as the God of Israel in human form.” (p.15)
“It would be fair to say that our team [Hurtado included] is broadly supportive of the Early High Christology Club approach to mapping the emergence of a fully blown “christological monotheism,” where the one God is known as and identified with Jesus the Christ.” (p.16)
Dale, on another note, have you seen that recent video on Socinianism/BU by Carl Trueman?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nx8KHOdMex0
Thanks for these interesting comments, and for the link. Will check that video out.
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